Exploring Connections in Ernest Hemingway's "A Day's Wait"

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Ernest Hemingway wrote "A Day's Wait" in the spring of 1933 for publication in a collection entitled Winner Take Nothing. Two previously unpublished letters aid the interpretation of the story by confirming its autobiographical nature. One letter was written by Hemingway in December of 1932 from a houseboat on which he and his editor were vacationing. The other corroborative letter was written in October of 1933 by Mary Pfeiffer to daughter Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, wife of Ernest Hemingway. Both letters unequivocally state that the events of the story occurred in Piggott, Arkansas in 1932.|Furthermore, the story is thematically, stylistically, and structurally consistent with Hemingway's other fiction.